Journeyman of Some #9 (2023 in Review)
2023 was a rollercoaster year with some of the highlights of my life alongside some of the biggest challenges. To jumpstart my newsletter in 2024, I thought I'd review the past year.
Closing Down Eldarion
Back in 2008, I decided to quit enterprise software and return to my roots in web development and open source and founded Eldarion, Inc. With the help of Tom Bennett, Ann Clark, Brian Rosner, Patrick Altman, Luke Hatcher, Jake Wegner and tens of contractors, we had a great time building open source software, a hosting platform, over 100 web applications for clients as well as tens of web applications of our own. But nothing really stuck and we never recovered from a downturn during the pandemic and so about 18 months ago, I started the process of winding things down.
Fortunately, I am still able to continue my digital humanities consulting and work on things like the Scaife Viewer via Signum University (although that has not been without its challenges).
Tolkien
It was a big year for me for Tolkien stuff, not least of which because of my Masters (see below). The Digital Tolkien Project was again short-listed for a Tolkien Society Award (ultimately won deservedly by the Tolkien Gateway). We started a Discord server for the Project and it's helped the community grow in ways I never imagined. We were able to crowdsource speaker identification for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.
I also started a YouTube channel which, after an initial video that went viral, is now back to growing modestly in subscribers. We also launched an early alpha of an online Tolkien Glossary where we're collecting information on all the words used by Tolkien in his Middle-earth works.
I gave the keynote at TexMoot and talked about Tolkien's Use of Invented Languages in The Lord of the Rings which was also the name of my chapter in the book Reading Fictional Languages that just came out from Edinburgh University Press. I also gave Tolkien-related talks at Mythmoot. IMC Leeds, and Oxonmoot.
In November, I visited Marquette University to spend time in the Tolkien Archives. I'd visited the exhibition there twice in 2022 but not actually spent time with the manuscripts before.
But perhaps my biggest Tolkien-related undertaking in 2023 was the teaching of twelve separate one-month courses (with help from Sara Brown, John Garth, Tom Hillman, and Patrick Lyon) at Signum's adult continuing education program, SPACE, on The History of Middle-earth. Twelve volumes. Twelve months in the year. It seemed a no-brainer. It succeeded beyond my wildest expectations with over 60 people attending at least one course and 20 attending at least ten. It also took way more time to prepare than I was ready for.
Lancaster MA
Probably my proudest achievement in 2023, though, was completing my MA in Corpus Linguistics from Lancaster University. It was a two year distance course and I was in the first ever cohort. With one exception I did all my term papers on something to do with Tolkien (I did a language learning paper on Ancient Greek) and my dissertation was a multidimensional register analysis of Tolkien. I submitted it from Oxonmoot where I had given a talk on the topic two days earlier, on the 50th anniversary of Tolkien's death. Shockingly (I really was surprised) I was awarded a distinction overall. In December, my wife and I went to Lancaster for my graduation.
Starship
TexMoot was a couple of days before the scheduled first test flight of Starship so I decided to rent a car and drive the four hours down from San Antonio to South Padre Island. The day I arrived, I decided to check out StarBase itself to see the rocket up close before its planned launch the following day.
I was on the beach on SPI that next day when the launch was scrubbed but I decided to extend my stay a few more days and got to watch that first flight from the roof of my hotel. I've heard it said a lot but nothing quite prepares you for both the emotions and the noise of a rocket launch. I definitely hope it's the first of many launches I go to.
Other Travel
I spent about six weeks travelling from late June to early August, attending the Corpus Linguistics conference in Lancaster and then IMC Leeds before driving around Scotland with my wife, attending a wedding in Oxford, and then flying to Australia to renew our US Visas.
Music
As well as teaching Tolkien, I had the opportunity to teach not one but two music courses this year, also through Signum's SPACE program and both with my dear friend Sarah Monnier. In March, we taught Music Theory for the Mathematically-Inclined. This was a course I'd wanted to teach for many years: a look at music theory that doesn't shy away from mathematical explanations. Then in October, we taught a course on Bach's Goldberg Variations where we listened, analyzed, and discussed our way through this incredible keyboard work.
Sarah and I had been doing an encoding of the Goldberg Variations in MEI XML prior to the course and we have lots more planned so if you are interested in Bach or music encoding, stay tuned!
Greek
The Greek Learner Texts Project moved to Discord this year because it was just too expensive to run Slack with full history. I didn't make a ton of progress on the project itself although did start work on a (not yet released) web interface to my vocabulary tools (which to-date has required writing Python to use). I did work on a tagged LXX text as well as the Morphological Lexicon I've been talking about for over a decade. Hopefully I'll be able to share more of that in the coming months.
Bluesky
In April, I got invited to Bluesky (I was about user 13,000) and immediately started diving into the underlying AT Protocol. Following my old adage that I don't understand something until I implement it in Python, I started my own library pybluesky but haven't really kept it up. In those early days, Bluesky was quite the experience. I knew no one (except the people I gave invite codes to). Over time I saw the Tolkien community form (mostly through my own invitations), then digital humanities and computational social sciences. Oddly the tech community is smaller there than I would have expected. I can understand those that use Mastodon (although it never stuck for me and I don't have the energy to work it out). I can't get into Threads at all.
The collapse (at least in my circles) of Twitter has been disappointing to me. Twitter was such a major part of my life for over 15 years and was core to so much of what Eldarion did. It was probably the biggest source of friendships, clients and side projects over that period. I owe so much to the connexions I made on Twitter.
Turning 50
Oh, and in November, I celebrated by 50th birthday.
